Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 174 posts

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#101

Post by samstave »

kfrzcode wrote: post #62
pjs_ wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going through the bibliography of other people's papers and theses, looking for papers that you better cite "for good luck", or because "you gotta cite that one" is a classic PhD student behavior (I've done it) and it's not terribly surprising that something like this can happen. In fact I'd expect it to be much more widespread...

Funny, in my high school literature class I clearly remember being chastised for having sources in my works cited; but not warranting their inclusion with an actual reference in the work. It's kind of wild that LLMs and other models/sequences will be able to quickly suss out which papers have high levels of referential integrity.

>which papers have high levels of referential integrity

The problem with this, as I see it IMO, is that there could be references that are cited due to their influence on the thought process/writing process of the work - thus citing them gives contextual zeitgeist - and this is something that AI would not be able to muster...

SO a LACK of referential integrity should show that it is written by a human as opposed to an AI.

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#102

Post by smaddox »

w-m wrote: post #26

Integral Neural Networks (CVPR 2023 Award Candidate), a nifty way of building resizable networks. My understanding of this work: A forward pass for a (fully-connected) layer of a neural network is just a dot product of the layer input with the layer weights, followed by some activation function. Both the input and the weights are vectors of the same, fixed size. Let's imagine that the discrete values that form these…

Nice. I was wondering if something like this is possible a few days ago. The next step would be somehow extending the discrete->continuous concept to layers.

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#103

Post by freedude »

An analysis of studies pertaining to masks in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: Characteristics and quality of all studies from 1978 to 2023

"0/77 were randomized studies."

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.07.23292338v...

Here is a pdf.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.07.07.23292338v...

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#104

Post by Uptrenda »

I find the most interesting papers I read all come from the same place: The National Library of Medicine https://www.nlm.nih.gov/

Here's some recent papers I liked:

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8413749/ -- Lithium is used as a mood stabilizer for bipolar and in other disorders. The form of Lithium used in psychiatry is Lithium Carbonate. But other forms also exist. As a supplement: there is Lithium Orotate which some people use to help them sleep, deal with stress, and so on. This paper puts forwards the idea that Lithium Orotate is preferable to Lithium Carbonate due to lower quantities being needed for the same therapeutic results. Resulting in less side-effects.

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1525098/ -- In bipolar disorder its known that there are abnormalities in the presence of brain derived neurotrophic growth factor (BDNF.) What's interesting about this is treatments for bipolar help to increase BDNF which may be something of interest to those who are into nootropics.

The papers on this site are honestly some of the best written, in-depth, and accessible works I've come across anywhere. There's enough information here to live a better life if you're willing to sift through papers. No joke.

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#105

Post by codethief »

the-mitr wrote: post #16

More is Different by P. W. Anderson (1972)'arguing that “at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear” — that is, although, for example, chemistry is subject to the laws of physics, we cannot infer the field of chemistry from our knowledge of physics.' The paper https://cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/ander... Also its impact https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-022-00483-x

> that is, although, for example, chemistry is subject to the laws of physics, we cannot infer the field of chemistry from our knowledge of physics

I mean we could, with infinite computing power and enough time to look into every interesting phenomenon (and to evaluate the corresponding multi-particle Schrödinger equation numerically) but there are simply too many such phenomena, Schrödinger equations are tough to solve, and quantum mechanics is also not a great level of abstraction for the reason you mentioned.

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#106

Post by radlad »

radlad wrote: post #50
edent wrote: post #17

"Overview of SHARD: A System for Highly Available Replicated Data" it's the first paper to introduce the concept of database sharding. It was published in 1988 by the Computer Corporation of America. It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers. But, here's the thing. It doesn't exist . Everyone cites Sarin, DeWitt & Rosenb[e|u]rg's paper but none have ever seen it. I've emailed dozens of academics, libr…

I found LinkedIn profiles for Sunil Sarin, Mark Dewitt, and Ronni Rosenberg who all worked at CCA during this time period. I've gone ahead and sent them each a message asking if they might be able to make the paper available. If you'd like to get in contact with them yourself and are having trouble finding their LinkedIn, shoot me an email and I'll be happy to provide you links.

I received a response from Dr. Rosenberg:

> Yes, I was involved, 35 years ago! I believe it was an internal CCA paper. I don't have a copy and I have no idea how to get it. Sorry about that. It does seem to be the earliest reference to "shard" in the DB context. (The other early reference pointed to in Wikipedia is from much later, 1997.)

> Fortunately, you need not go back 35 years to read about sharding; it's easy to get current info. Cheers.

I've now sent a message to Andy Youniss, CEO of Rocket Software to see if he can help.

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#107

Post by codethief »

edent wrote: post #17

"Overview of SHARD: A System for Highly Available Replicated Data" it's the first paper to introduce the concept of database sharding. It was published in 1988 by the Computer Corporation of America. It is referenced hundreds of times in many classic papers. But, here's the thing. It doesn't exist . Everyone cites Sarin, DeWitt & Rosenb[e|u]rg's paper but none have ever seen it. I've emailed dozens of academics, libr…

Have you contacted authors of papers citing the one you're looking for, especially of papers that appeared shortly after / in the 90s? Maybe one of them still has a paper copy lying around somewhere.

I was in a similar situation before with some math paper from the 50s that's nowhere to be found (neither online nor in library indices) and you'd be surprised how many professors still use paper copies.

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#108

Post by fancyfredbot »

GregarianChild wrote: post #31
claytonjy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First time for ML that is not deep learning What do you mean by this? Virtually all "classic" or "shallow" ML can be GPU-accelerated, from linear regression to SVM to GBM.

Can you point me to papers with reproducible benchmarking that achieves big speedups on those? Modern GPUs are GP -GPUs: where GP means "general purpose" : you can run any code on GPGPUs. But if you want to gain real speed-ups you will have to program in an awkward style ("data parallel"). I am not aware of GPU acceleration of the work-horses of symbolic AI, such as Prolog, or SMT solving. There has been a lot of wor…

The parent comment is talking about SVM, which is not a form of symbolic AI. SVM and other kernel based algorithms contain naturally data parallel steps like summing f(z-x[i]) for some kernel function f and all sample data x[i]. These will work great on GPU once you have a few thousand data points.

Re: Ask HN: Which recent research paper blew your mind?

#110

Post by agumonkey »

cinericius wrote: post #40
yung_steezy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an example of reference rot or did it never exist?

If it did exist, there's some delicious irony in an original paper on replicating data in a highly-available manner being lost.

An endless runaway replica wave. Poetic.
Post reply on HN